Nietzsche, the Thinker

Salter

PREFACE

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CRITICISM OF NIETZSCHE IS RIFE, understanding rare; this book is a contribution to the understanding of him. At the same time I have tried not merely to restate his thoughts, but to re-think them, using more or less my own language. To enable those interested to judge of the correctness of the interpretation, the original passages are referred to almost constantly. I limit myself to his fundamental points of view—noting only in passing or not at all his thoughts on education, his later views of art and music, his conception of woman, his interpretation of Christianity and attitude to religion.

If I differ from some who have written in English upon him, it is partly in a sense of the difficulty and delicacy of the undertaking. Few appear to have thought it worth while to study Nietzsche—the treatment he commonly receives is (to use an expressive German word, for which I know no good short equivalent) plump. If I should be myself found—by those who know—to have simplified him at times too much and not done justice to all his nuances, I should not protest and only hope that some day some one will do better.

The book was in substance written before the present European War, and without a thought of such a monstrous possibility. It has become the fashion to connect Nietzsche closely with it. One American professor has even called it—the German side of it—Nietzsche in Action and an early book by a group of Oxford scholars, Why We Are at War, was advertised under the heading The Euro-Nietzschean (or Anglo-Nietzschean) War. But as matter of fact, the war would probably have arisen about as it did and been conducted about as it has been, had he never existed; and so far as I can find him touching it in any special way, it is as a diagnostician of the general conditions which appear to have given birth to it—i.e., what he calls Europe’s system of small states and small politics (in contrast to a united Europe and a great politics, on which he set his heart), "this névrose nationale with which Europe is sick, this sickness and unreason which is the strongest force against culture that exists, nationalism, for perpetuating which he holds Germans largely [perhaps too much] responsible, and which with the founding of the German Empire passed into a critical state" (Ecce Homo, XII, x, § 2; Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 39). These last words may perhaps be said to suggest some such catastrophe as has now taken place, and I know of no other passage that foreshadows it more particularly. I have dealt with the subject in a special article elsewhere (Nietzsche and the War, International Journal of Ethics, April, 1917). That our own country has now been drawn—forced—into the maelstrom does not alter its essential character.

As to the final disposition of Nietzsche, I offer no counsels now, and really, as intimated, counsels—criticism, such as it is—abound. Even one’s newspaper will usually put him in his place! Or, if one wishes a book, Mr. Paul Elmer More’s Nietzsche, compact as David’s pebble, will serve, the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine tells us, to slay the Nietzschean giant, and if we desire heavier blows,—I will not say they are more skilful—we may take up Dr. Paul Carus’s Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism. What, however, does not seem to abound is knowledge of the object slain, or to be slain, i.e., some elementary and measurably clear idea of who, or rather what, Nietzsche was, particularly in his underlying points of view. And even the present fresh attempt in this direction—for others have preceded me, notably Dr. Dolson, Mr. Ludovici, Miss Hamblen, Dr. Chatterton-Hill, Dr. A. Wolf, author of the best extant monograph on Nietzsche, and Professor H. L. Stewart, whose eye, however, is rather too much on present controversial issues for scientific purposes—would be a work of supererogation, had Nietzsche ever given us an epitome of his thinking himself, or were Professor Raoul Richter’s masterly Friedrich Nietzsche, sein Leben und sein Werk translated into English, or were Professor Henri Lichtenberger’s admirable La Philosophie de Nietzsche, which has been translated, a little more extended and thoroughgoing—at least, my book could then only beg consideration from Americans as a piece of home industry. As for criticism—unquestionably the thing of final moment in relation to every thinker—if I can only help to make it in this case a little more intelligent in the future, I shall for the present be satisfied.

I owe thanks to Mr. Thomas Common of Corstorphine, Scotland—perhaps the first English—speaking Nietzsche scholar of our day, first in both senses of the word—for help in locating passages from the Works, which I omitted to note the source of in first coming upon them and could not afterward find, or which I came upon in other writers on Nietzsche. Unfortunately a few remain unlocated—also some from the Briefe. Acknowledgments are due to the editors of The Hibbert Journal, The International Journal of Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, and Mind for permission to use material which originally appeared as articles in those periodicals.

Though gratefully recognizing the enterprise of Dr. Oscar Levy in making possible an English translation of the greater part of Nietzsche’s Werke, I have used the original German editions, making my own translations or versions—save of poetical passages, where I have been glad to follow, with his permission, Mr. Common. I cite, however, as far as possible, by paragraph or section, the same in the Werke (both octavo and pocket editions) and the English, French, and other translations; the posthumous material, except Will to Power and Ecce Homo, I am obliged to cite by volume and page of the German octavo edition (vols. IX-XIV inclusive—the second eds. of IX to XII), where alone it appears in full. I have also drawn on Nietzsche’s Briefe (6 vols.). The recently published Philologica (3 vols.), principally records of his University teaching, I have practically left unutilized. The numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) in the text refer to the bottom of the page, the letters (a, b, c, etc.) to notes at the end of the book. "Werke" means the octavo edition, unless otherwise stated.

W. M. S.

Silver Lake, New Hampshire,

June, 1917

INTRODUCTORY

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CHAPTER I

NIETZSCHE’S RELATION TO HIS TIME; HIS LIFE AND PERSONAL TRAITS

I

Once when about to give a Nietzsche course before a university audience, those in charge suggested to me—a novice in such situations—that I should begin by considering some of the notable aspects or tendencies of our present civilization which Nietzsche expresses, so as to give a raison d’être for the course. It seemed to be taken for granted that he reflected the age and was chiefly important as illustration—perhaps as warning. I confess that I was somewhat embarrassed. For what had struck me as I had been reading him was that he went more or less counter to most of the distinctive tendencies of our time. My personal experience had been of shock after shock. Long before, and when he was little more than a name to me, I had spoken of the idea of getting beyond good and evil as naturally landing one in a madhouse; and when I first read him and ventured to lecture on him before an Ethical Society (1907), I could only consider him as an enemy who stood strikingly and brilliantly for what we do not believe.

As afterward I came to know him more thoroughly, I was less willing to pass sweeping judgment upon him, and yet the impression only deepened that here was a force antagonistic to the dominant forces about us. At many points he seemed more mediæval than modern. He failed to share the early nineteenth century enthusiasm for liberty, and he opposed the later socialistic tendency. He regretted the intensification of the nationalist spirit which set in among the various European countries after the defeat of Napoleon, deeming it reactionary—his ideas were super-national, European. He found retrogression in Germany, and belabored the Empire and the new Deutschthum. He shared, indeed, the modern scientific spirit, but he could not long content himself with a purely scientific philosophy and deplored the lapse of German philosophy into criticism and scientific specialism. Of Darwinism I might say that he accepted it and did not accept it, whether as natural history or as morals, regarding the struggle for existence, unhindered by ideal considerations, as favoring, through overemphasis of the social virtues, the survival of the weak rather than the strong. In the religious field, the tendency today is, amid uncertainties about Christian dogma, to emphasize Christian morality—Nietzsche questioned Christian morality itself. In business relations the time is marked by commercialism and a certain ruthless egoism (on all sides), but Nietzsche, though with an occasional qualification, had something of the feeling of an old-time aristocrat for the commercial spirit; he lamented the effect of our American gold-hunger upon Europe; he thought that one trouble with Germany was that there were too many traders there, paying producers the lowest and charging consumers the highest price; he wished a political order that would control egoisms, whether high or low. War, at least till the present monstrous one, has not characterized our age more than others, but there have been wars enough—and Nietzsche found most of them ignoble: trade, combined with narrow nationalistic aims, inspires them—the peoples having become like traders who lie in wait to take advantage of one another; the present war he would probably have found not unlike the rest. All this, though he held that the warlike instinct, in some form or other, belonged essentially to human nature as to all advancing life, and that in all probability war in the literal sense would have worthy occasion in the future.

The fact is that Nietzsche was a markedly individual thinker and lived to an extraordinary extent from within. While it would be venturesome to say that there is anything new in him and a subtle chemistry might perhaps trace every thought or impulse of his to some external source, the sources lay to a relatively slight extent in his immediate environment. Unquestionably he was influenced by Schopenhauer and by Wagner; but it was not long before he was critical toward them both. Late in life he remarked that to be a philosopher one must be capable of great admirations, but must also have a force of opposition—and he thought that he had stood the tests, as he had allowed himself to be alienated from his principal concern, neither by the great political movement of Germany, nor by the artistic movement of Wagner, nor by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, though his experiences had been hard and at times he was ill. In another retrospection he says that while like Wagner he was a child of his time, hence a decadent, he had known how to defend himself against the fatality. So slight did he feel his contact with the time to be, so imperceptible was his influence, so profound his isolation, particularly in his later years, that he spoke of himself as an accident among Germans, and said with a touch of humor, My time is not yet, some are posthumously born. I cannot make out that his influence is appreciable now—at least in English-speaking countries; even in Germany, where for a time he had a certain vogue, his counsels and ideas have been far more disregarded than followed—and though in the present war some university-bred soldiers may be inspired by his praise of the warrior-spirit and the manly virtues, men from Oxford might be similarly inspired, if they but knew him. He has, indeed, given a phrase and perhaps an idea or two to Mr. Bernard Shaw, a few scattering scholars have got track of him (I know of but two or three in America), the great newspaper and magazine-writing and reading world has picked up a few of his phrases, which it does not understand, like superman, blond beast, will to power, beyond good and evil, transvaluation of values—but influence is another matter. He has changed nothing, whether in thought or public policy, has neither lifted men up nor lowered them, though mistaken images of him may have had occasionally the latter effect, the truth being simply that he is out of most men’s ken.

But because a man, however much talked about, has had slight real influence, having gone mostly counter to the currents of his time, it does not follow that he is not important, even vastly so, and that the future will not take large account of him. I do not wish to prophesy, but I have a suspicion that sometime—perhaps at no very distant date—writers on serious themes will be more or less classified according as they know him or not; that we shall be speaking of a pre-Nietzschean and a post-Nietzschean period in philosophical, and particularly in ethical and social, analysis and speculation—and that those who have not made their reckoning with him will be as hopelessly out of date as those who have failed similarly with Kant. Already I am conscious for my own part of a certain antiquated air in much of our contemporary discussion—it is unaware of the new and deep problems which Nietzsche raises; and the references made to him (for almost every writer seems to feel that he must refer to him) only show how superficial the acquaintance with him ordinarily is. Far am I from asserting that we shall follow him; I simply mean that we shall know him, ponder over him, perchance grapple with him—and whether he masters us or we him, the strength of the struggle and the illumination born of it will become part of our better intellectual selves.

II

Although this book is no biography of Nietzsche (save in the spiritual sense), it may be well at the outset to state the main facts of his life, and also to mention some of the striking points in his personal character.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, a small Prussian village, where his father was a Protestant pastor. His mother was a pastor’s daughter—and back of his father on both sides there was a current of theological blood. From his fourteenth to his twentieth year he was at Schulpforta, one of the strictest and best of German preparatory schools. At twenty he went to the University at Bonn, matriculating as a student of theology and philosophy. A year later he followed his great teacher, Ritschl, to Leipzig, having meanwhile concentrated upon philosophical and philological study, and producing during his two years there learned treatises which were published in the Rheinisches Museum (Zur Geschichte der Theognidischen Spruchsammlung, Vol. XXII; De Laertii Diogenis fontibus, Vols. XXIII, XXIV). While in Leipzig he read Schopenhauer, and met Wagner. His university work was broken only by a period of military service. Before taking the doctor’s degree, he was called to the chair of classical philology in the University at Basel, his philological work having attracted attention and Ritschl saying that he could do what he would. He was now twenty-four (1868). The Leipzig faculty forthwith gave him the doctor’s degree without examination. After two years he became Professor ordinarius. He also undertook work in the Basel Pädagogium (a kind of higher gymnasium). His acquaintance with Wagner now ripened into an intimate friendship—Wagner living not far away on Lake Lucerne. In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, he could not serve his country as soldier, since he had become naturalized in Switzerland, but he entered the ambulance-service. Dysentery and diphtheria, however, attacked him—and the after-effects lingered long, if not throughout his life. In 1876, the year also of the Bayreuth opening, and when differences which had been developing with Wagner culminated, he was obliged on account of ill-health to relinquish his work at the Pädagogium and in the spring of 1879 he resigned his professorship in the University as well. He was at this time thirty-five, but to his sister who saw him not long after, he seemed old and broken, "ein gebrochener, müder, gealteter Mann." His outer movements were thereafter largely determined by considerations of health. He spent the summers usually in the Upper Engadine, and winters on the French or Italian Riviera. He lasted nearly ten years, when he was overtaken by a stroke of paralysis which affected the brain (late December, 1888, or early January, 1889, in Turin). His naturally vigorous bodily frame withstood actual death till August 25, 1900.

Owing to current misapprehension a special word should be said as to his insanity. The popular impression among us is perhaps largely traceable to a widely read book by a semi-scientific writer, Dr. Max Nordau, entitled (in the English translation, which appeared twenty or more years ago) Degeneration; in a chapter devoted to Nietzsche it was stated that his works had been written between periods of residence in a madhouse. The legend dies hard and lingers on faintly in the latest writers who have not made any real study of the case. The fact is, that the insanity came, as just indicated, suddenly, almost without warning, for his latest writings are some of his most lucid—and that nothing was produced by him afterward, save a few incoherent notes and letters, written or scrawled in the first days of his dementia. That there are any anticipations of the catastrophe (i.e., signs of incipient dementia) in his books is at best a subjective opinion—indeed it is a view which tends to be abandoned more and more. Highly wrought Nietzsche often was, particularly in his latest writings; he said extravagant things and uttered violent judgments. So did Carlyle; so have many earnest, lonely men, struggling unequally with their time; but insanity is another matter.

The causes of his collapse were probably manifold. A few circumstances may be mentioned which may have co-operated to produce the result. Nietzsche himself mentions a decadent inheritance which he had from his father, though he thought it counterbalanced by a robust one from his mother. While serving his time in the Prussian artillery, he suffered a grave rupture of muscles of the chest in mounting a restive horse, and for a time his life was in danger. During the Franco-Prussian war, the illnesses already mentioned were aggravated by strong medicines that seem to have permanently deranged his digestion; in any case, sick-headaches of an intense and often prolonged character became frequent. He had serious eye-troubles (he was always nearsighted), and became almost blind late in life. Strain of this and every kind produced insomnia—and this in turn led to the use of drugs, and of stronger and stronger ones. All the time he was leading the intensest intellectual life. Whether such a combination of causes was sufficient to produce the result, medical experts must judge. Nietzsche himself once remarked, We all die too young from a thousand mistakes and ignorances as to how to act.

III

By nature he was of vigorous constitution. He had been fond as a boy of swimming and skating, and at the University, until his disablement, was an active horseback rider. At Bonn he appeared a picture of health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather thick fair hair, and of exactly the same height as Goethe. He had strong musical tastes and some musical ability. A tender conscience seems to have belonged to him from his earliest years. When a mere child, a missionary visited his father’s parish and at a meeting plead movingly for his cause; the little Fritz responded with an offering of his tin soldiers—and afterwards, walking home with his sister, he murmured, "Perhaps I ought to have given my cavalry! He was clean both in person and in thought. At school the boys called him the little parson, instinctively repressing coarse language in his presence. He had a taste of dissipation at the University, but soon sickened of it. The delights of drinking and duelling palled on him, and openly expressed dissatisfaction with the beer-materialism of his fellow-students, and strained relations ensuing, appear to have had something to do with his leaving Bonn for Leipzig. Once he allowed himself to be taken to a house of questionable character, but became speechless before what he saw there. For a moment he turned to the piano—and then left. Professor Deussen, who knew him from Schulpforta days on, says of him, mulierem nunquam attigit; and though this may be too absolute a claim, it shows the impression he left on one of his most intimate friends. He was never married. He had, however, intimate relations with gifted women, like Frau Cosima Wagner and Malwida von Meysenbug, and his family affections were strong and tender; so unwilling was he to give his mother needless pain that he strove to keep his later writings from her. He had at bottom a sympathetic nature. If he warned against pity, it was not from any instinctive lack of it. In personal intercourse he showed marked politeness and, some say, an almost feminine mildness. All his life he was practically a poor man, his yearly income never exceeding a thousand dollars. He called it his happiness that he owned no house, saying, Who possesses is possessed; liked to wait on himself; despised the dinners of the rich; loved solitude, aside from a few friends—and the common people. Some of the latter class, in the later days of his illness and comparative emaciation in Genoa, spoke endearingly of him as il santo or il piccolo santo. He had remarkable strength of will. Once, when the story of Mutius Scaevola was being discussed among his schoolmates, he lighted a number of matches on his hand and held out his arm without wincing, to prove that one could be superior to pain. After reading Schopenhauer, he practised bodily penance for a short time. Later on he asserted himself against the illnesses that befell him in extraordinary fashion, and when he became mentally and spiritually disillusioned, he was able to wrest strength from his very deprivations. In general, there was an unusual firmness in his moral texture. He despised meanness, untruthfulness, cowardice; he liked straight speaking and straight thinking. He did not have one philosophy for the closet and another for life, as Schopenhauer more or less had, but his thoughts were motives, rules of conduct. In his thinking itself we seem to catch the pulse-beats of his virile will. Professor Riehl calls him perhaps the most masculine character among our philosophers. He was not without a certain nobleness, too. He once said, a sufferer has no right to pessimism, i.e., to build a general view on a personal experience. Nor was he dogmatic, overbearing—in spirit at least; I shall speak of this point later. He owned that he contradicted himself more or less. This thinker [he evidently alludes to himself] needs no one to confute him; he suffices to that end himself. Nor did he wish to be kept from following his own path by friendly defense or adulation. The man of knowledge, he said, must be able not only to love his enemies, but to hate his friends." In short, there was a kind of unworldliness about him, not in the ordinary, but in a lofty sense. I discover few traces of vanity in him (at least before the last year or two of his life), though not a little pride; he cared little for reputation, save among a few; and he was not ungenerous, saying toward the close of his life that he had difficulty in citing one case of literary ill-will, though he had been overwhelmed by ignorance. I do not mean that his language is not severe at times, unwarrantably so; but he tells us almost pathetically in one place that we must not underscore these passages and that the severity and presumption come partly from his isolation. A lonely thinker, who finds no sympathy or echo for his ideas, involuntarily, he says, raises his pitch, and falls easily into irritated speech.

Perhaps I should add that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing has partly a physical explanation. He was able to write only at intervals, and would put down his thoughts at auspicious moments, oftenest when he was out walking or climbing; one year he had, he tells us, two hundred sick days. Such ill fortune was extreme—afterward he fared better—but he was more or less incapacitated every year. He undoubtedly made a virtue of necessity and brought his aphoristic style of writing to a high degree of perfection—sometimes he almost seems to make it his ideal; it is noticeable, however, that in Genealogy of Morals, in The Antichristian, and in Ecce Homo he writes almost as connectedly as in his first treatises, and he appears to have projected Will to Power as a systematic work. The aphorisms are often extremely pregnant, Professor Richter remarking that Nietzsche can in this way give more to the reader in minutes than systematic writers in hours.

CHAPTER II

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING

I

Nietzsche’s life was practically one of thought. Of outer events, experiences in the ordinary sense, there were few: we have not our heart there, he confesses, and not even our ear. But to the great problems of life he stood in a very personal relation. He philosophized not primarily for others’ sake, but for his own, from a sense of intimate need. Body and mind co-operated. I have written all my books with my whole body and life; I do not know what purely spiritual problems are. May I say it? all truths are for me bloody truths—let one look at my previous writings. These things you know as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, but the echo of the experiences of others: as when your room shakes from a wagon passing by. But I sit in the wagon, and often I am the wagon itself. These were private memoranda that have been published since his death, but an attentive reader of books he published often has the sense of their truth borne in upon him. As he puts it objectively in Joyful Science, it makes all the difference in the world whether a thinker is personally related to his problems, so that his fate is bound up in them, or is impersonal, touching them only with the feelers of cool, curious thought. So earnest is he, so much does this make a sort of medium through which he sees the world, that he once set down Don Quixote as a harmful book, thinking that the parodying of the novels of chivalry which one finds there becomes in effect irony against higher strivings in general—Cervantes, he says, who might have fought the Inquisition, chose rather to make its victims, heretics and idealists of all sorts, laughable, and belongs so far to the decadence of Spanish culture. Some have even been led to question whether Nietzsche was capable of humor. But there is no need to go to this length. Not only does he give a high place to laughter in his books, not only are there special instances of humorous description to be found there, but colleagues of his at Basel, like Burckhardt and Overbeck, testify to his infectious laughter at their frequent meeting place ("Baumannshöhle), Nietzsche himself owning that he had much to make up for, since he had laughed so little as child and boy. For all this the undercurrent of his life was unquestionably serious, and he cannot be placed among writers who give us much surface cheer. Occasionally he indulges in pleasantries to the very end of relief from graver work—such, for instance, as those which make a part of The Case of Wagner" (see the preface to this pamphlet, where it is also said that the subject itself is not one to make light about), and those in Twilight of the Idols. In the preface to the latter he remarks that when one has a great task like that of a "turning round (Umwerthung) of all values," one must shake off at times the all too heavy weight of seriousness it brings.

As his motives in philosophizing were personal, so were the results he attained—some of them at least: they were for him, helped him to live, whether they were valuable for others or not. Referring to certain of his writings, he calls them his recipe and self-prepared medicine against life-weariness. In a posthumous fragment (perhaps from a preface for a possible book), he says, "Here a philosophy—one of my philosophies—comes to expression, which has no wish to be called ‘love of wisdom,’ but begs, perhaps from pride, for a more modest name: a repulsive name indeed, which may for its part contribute to making it remain what it wishes to be: a philosophy for myself—with the motto: satis sunt mihi pauci, satis est unus, satis est nullus. Sometimes he distrusts writing for the general, saying that the thinker may make himself clearer in this way, but is liable to become flatter also, not expressing his most intimate and best self—he confesses that he is shocked now and then to see how little of his own inmost self is more than hinted at in his writings. He admires Schopenhauer for having written for himself; for no one, he says, wishes to be deceived, least of all a philosopher who takes as his law, Deceive no one, not even thyself. He comes to say at last, I take readers into account no longer: how could I write for readers? … But I note myself down, for myself. Mihi ipsi scripsi—so it is; and in this way shall each one do his best for himself according to his kind. At least this became an ideal, for he owns that sometimes he has hardly the courage for his own thoughts (I have only rarely the courage for what I really know").

If I may give in a sentence what seems to me the inmost psychology and driving force of his thinking, it was like this:—Being by nature and by force of early training reverent, finding, however, his religious faith undermined by science and critical reflection, his problem came to be how, consistently with science and the stern facts of life and the world, the old instincts of reverence might still have measurable satisfaction, and life again be lit up with a sense of transcendent things. He was at bottom a religious philosopher—this, though the outcome of his thinking is not what would ordinarily be called religious. There is much irony in him, much contempt, but it is because he has an ideal; and his final problem is how some kind of a practical approximation to the ideal may be made. He himself says that one who despises is ever one who has not forgotten how to revere.

II

The question is sometimes raised whether Nietzsche was a philosopher at all. Some deny it, urging that he left no systematic treatises behind him; they admit that he may have been a poet, or a master of style (stylist, to use a barbarous word imported from the German), or a prophet—but he was not a thinker. But because a man does not write systematically, or even does not care to, it does not follow that he has not deep-going, more or less reasoned thoughts, and that these thoughts do not hang together. Nietzsche reflected on first principles in almost every department of human interest (except perhaps mathematics). Though his prime interest is man and morals, he knows that these subjects cannot be separated from broader and more ultimate ones, and we have his ideas on metaphysics and the general constitution of the world. Poets, stylists, prophets do not commonly lead others to write about their theory of knowledge, do not frequently deal, even in aphorisms, with morality as a problem, with cause and effect, with first and last things. Undoubtedly Nietzsche appears inconsistent at times, perhaps is really so. Not only does he express strongly what he thinks at a given time and leaves it to us to reconcile it with what he says at other times, not only does he need for interpreter some one with a literary as well as scientific sense, but his views actually differ more or less from time to time, and even at the same time—and Professor Höffding is not quite without justification in suggesting that they might more properly have been put in the form of a drama or dialogue. Nietzsche himself, in speaking of his philosophy, qualifies and says philosophies, as we have just seen. And yet there is coherence to a certain extent in each period of his life, and at last there is so much that we might almost speak of a system. There is even a certain method in his changes—one might say, using Hegelian language, that there is first an affirmation, then a negation, and finally an affirmation which takes up the negation into itself. Indeed, the more closely I have attended to his mental history, the more I have become aware of continuing and constant points of view throughout—so much so that I fear I may be found to repeat myself unduly, taking him up period by period as I do. The testimony of others may be interesting in this connection. Professor René Berthelot remarks in the Grande Encyclopédie, though with particular to the works of the last period, They are the expression of a perfectly coherent doctrine, although Nietzsche has never made a systematic exposition of it. Dr. Richard Beyer says, His doctrine does not lack system but systematic presentation, which however also Socrates, a Leibnitz did not leave behind them. Professor Vaihinger, who writes professedly not as a disciple, much less apostle of Nietzsche, but simply as an historian of philosophy, describes his book by saying, "I have brought the seemingly disorderly scattered fragments, the disjecta membra, into a strictly consistent system. Nietzsche himself, though ordinarily too much in his struggles to grasp them as a whole and see their final import, occasionally had a clear moment and looked as from a height upon the sum-total of his work. Writing from Turin to Brandes, 4th May, 1888, to the effect that his weeks there had turned out better than any for years, above all more philosophic, he adds, Almost every day for one or two hours I have reached such a point of energy that I could see as from an eminence my total conception—the immense variety of problems lying spread out before me in relief and clear outline. For this a maximum of force is needed, which I had hardly hoped for. Everything hangs together, for years everything has been going in the right direction; one builds his philosophy like a beaver—is necessary and does not know it." He once expressed a wish that some one should make a kind of résumé of the results of his thinking, evidently with the notion that there were results which might be put in orderly fashion. Professor Richter describes his own book—the most valuable one on the philosophical side which has been written on Nietzsche—as a modest attempt to fulfil that wish. But why argue or quote? Any one who cares to read on in these pages will be able to judge for himself whether and how far Nietzsche was a philosopher—no one imagines that he was one in the sense that Kant and Aristotle were.

III

I have spoken of Nietzsche’s changes. He is strongly contrasted in this respect with his master Schopenhauer, whose views crystallized when he was still young and varied thereafter in no material point. Only one who changes, he tells us, is kindred to him. One must be willing to pass away, in order to be able to rise again. It is easy to misunderstand the spirit of the changes. Professor Saintsbury can see little in them but the desire to be different. Nietzsche himself admits that he likes short-lived habits, hence not an official position, or continual intercourse with the same person, or a fixed abode, or one kind of health. And yet the movements of his thought impress me as on the whole more necessitated than chosen. His break with the religious faith of his youth was scarcely from a whim. If one doubts, let one read the mournful paragraph beginning, Thou wilt never more pray, and judge for himself—or note the tone of All that we have loved when we were young has deceived us, or of What suffering for a child always to judge good and evil differently from his mother, and to be scorned and despised where he reveres! So no one who reads with any care the records of his intercourse with Wagner, can think that he welcomed the final break. Rather was he made ill by it, in body and soul—it was the great tragedy of his mature life. Giving up the ideas of free-will and responsibility was not from choice; even the idea of eternal recurrence was first forced upon him. Almost the only region in which he felt free to follow his will was in projecting a moral ideal, and in the moral field itself he recognized strict limits. In general, he not so much chose his path as chose to follow it. He felt a task, and the burden of his truths. Has ever a man searched on the path of truth in the way I have—namely, striving and arguing against all that was grateful to my immediate feeling? He opposed the artist love of pleasure, the artist lack of conscience, which would persuade us to worship where we no longer believe. Nowhere perhaps more than in the religious field does feeling run riot today, nowhere does epicureanism, soft hedonism, more flourish—Nietzsche put it from him. He had the will to be clean with himself, hard with himself—he despised feeling’s soft luxurious flow, if I may borrow Newman’s phrase, when the issue was one of truth. He regarded libertinism of the intellect as, along with vice, crime, celibacy, pessimism, anarchism, a consequence of decadence. Sometimes his dread of being taken in seems almost morbid. For instance, in referring to the feelings connected with doing for others, not for ourselves, he says that there is far too much charm and sweetness in these feelings not to make it necessary to be doubly mistrustful and to ask, ‘are they not perhaps seductions?’ That they please—please him who has them and him who enjoys their fruits, also the mere onlooker—this still is no argument for them, but just a reason for being circumspect. Pleasure, comfort, the wishes of the heart no test of truth—such is his ever-recurring point of view. Indeed, instead of there being any pre-established harmony between the true and the agreeable, he thinks that the experience of stricter, deeper minds is rather to the contrary. Sometimes his impulse to the true and real is a torment to him, he is böse towards it and declares that not truth, but appearance, falsehood, is divine; and yet the impulse masters him. Posterity, he says, speaks of a man rising higher and higher, but it knows nothing of the martyrdom of the ascent; a great man is pushed, pressed, crowded, martyred up into his height. He views the philosopher’s task as something hard, unwilled, unrefusable; and so far as he is alone, it is not because he wills it, but because he is something that does not find its like. "A philosophy that does not promise to make one happier and more virtuous, that rather lets it be understood that one taking service under it will probably go to ruin—that is, will be solitary in his time, will be burned and scalded, will have to know many kinds of mistrust and hate, will need to practise much hardness against himself and alas! also against others—such a philosophy offers easy flattery to no one: one must be born for it. Not all are so born, he freely admits, and he speaks of himself as a law for his own, not for all. He even says that a deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood, for in the latter case his vanity perhaps suffers, but in the former his heart, his sympathy, which always says, ‘Ah, why will you have things as hard as I?’ So independence is to his mind something for few, and one should not attempt it, unless compelled." So much did he feel that necessity hedges us about and that we must come to terms with it, that amor fati became one of his mottoes.

IV

And yet loneliness, and, above all, change in loneliness are not agreeable things, and it is impossible to avoid a sense of insecurity in the midst of them. With all his assurance Nietzsche knew that his way was a dangerous one, and he had his moments of misgiving. He craved companionship and the support that companionship gives. Once the confession drops from him that after an hour of sympathetic intercourse with men of opposite views his whole philosophy wavers, so foolish does it seem to wish to be in the right at the cost of love, and so hard not to be able to communicate what is dearest for fear of losing sympathy—hinc meae lacrimae. He had accordingly no wish to impose himself on others. He asks youthful readers not to take his doctrines forthwith as a guide of life, but rather as theses to be weighed; he throws the responsibility on them, urging them to be true to themselves even against him, and saying that so they will be really true to him. In the same spirit he says,

"It lureth thee, my mode and speech?

Thou followest me, to hear me teach?

Nay! Guide thyself—honest and fair—

And follow me, with care! with care!"

He regards it as part of the humanity of a teacher to caution his pupils against himself, and even says that a pupil rewards his teacher ill who always remains his pupil. Knowing from his own experience how difficult it is to find the truth, having become mistrustful of those who are sure they have it, deeming such confidence indeed an obstacle to truth—knowing that one may actually have to turn against oneself in the higher loyalty, he holds those alone to be genuine pupils, i.e., genuine continuers of a teacher’s thought, who, if need be, oppose it. He wished his own philosophy to advance slowly among men, to be tried, criticised, or even overcome. He felt that it was above all problems which he presented, and his most pressing preliminary need was of help in formulating them—as soon as you feel against me, you do not understand my state of mind, and hence not my arguments either. What a sense he had of the uncertainty of his way is shown in a memorandum like this: This way is so dangerous! I dare not speak to myself, being like a sleep-walker, who wanders over house-roofs and has a sacred right not to be called by name. ‘What do I matter?’ is the only consoling voice I wish to hear. He came to have a sense of the problematical in morality itself—just that about which most of us have no doubts at all (whether because we think, or do not think, I leave undetermined). Science [positive knowledge] reveals the flow of things, but not the goal. It has been proved impossible to build a culture on scientific knowledge alone. Hence he says frankly to us, "This is my way, where is yours? The way—there is not."

And yet it would be leaving something out of account if I did not add that in following his uncertain, venturesome way, Nietzsche experienced a certain elevation of spirit. It was the mood of the explorer—the risk gives added zest. He sometimes uses a word that sounds strange on the lips of a thinker: dance. It connotes for him joy, but joy that goes with the meeting of danger and risk. The dancer is a fine balancer, as when one treads a tight rope or goes on smooth ice. He ventures, goes ahead on a basis of probabilities and possibilities. Nietzsche speaks of bidding farewell to assured conviction or the wish for certainty, of balancing oneself on delicate ropes and possibilities, of dancing even on the edge of abysses. Some think that by dancing he meant playing with words and arbitrary thinking, but it is something, he tells us, that just the philosopher has got to do well—a quick, fine, glad dealing with uncertainties and dangers is the philosopher’s ideal and art. In a sense, all movement involves risk, even walking does, and dancing is only a heightened instance. It may be not quite irrelevant to remark that one of Nietzsche’s tests of books or men or music was, whether there was movement in them or no, whether they could walk and still more dance; also that he himself liked to think, walking, leaping, climbing, dancing—above all on lonely mountains or by the sea where the paths were hazardous. He had a kind of distrust of ideas that came to one seated over a book, and thought he had, so to speak, caught Flaubert in the act, when he found him observing, "on ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis. The venturesome element in life, above all in the life of thought, only lent it a new charm. Though at first the large amount of accident and chaos in the world oppressed him, he came to say dear accident, beautiful chaos." For once he would have agreed with George Eliot,

"Nay, never falter: no great deed is done

By falterers who ask for certainty."

The mind, he felt, reaches the acme of its power in dealing with uncertainties; it is the weaker sort who want the way assured beyond doubt.

Because of his variations of mood, it is not easy definitely to characterize it. Professor Ziegler speaks of him as a metaphysically dissatisfied man, and Dr. Möbius has a similar view. Nietzsche once spoke of himself as "profondément triste. It does not appear, however, that he was temperamentally melancholy; Möbius describes him rather as sanguine-choleric, and his sister says (despite what I have already quoted) that he was given to playfulness and jokes as a boy—it was his thoughts, his disillusionment about men and things, that saddened him. With the shadow lurking only around the corner for most of us—a skepticism as to life’s value" (to quote Miss Jane Addams) he was only too familiar. Let one read not only the passages I have already cited, but one in Thus spake Zarathustra beginning The sun is already long down, or a description of the proud sufferer, or an almost bitter paragraph on the last sacrifice of religion, namely the sacrifice of God himself. And yet he met his depression and triumphed over it. He suffered much, renounced much—we feel it particularly in the works of the middle period—and yet he gained far more than he lost, and will probably go down in history as one of the great affirmers of life and the world. But his joy is ever a warrior’s joy—it is never the easy serenity, the unruffled optimism of Emerson.

CHAPTER III

HIS MEGALOMANIA, PERIODS, CONSTANT POINTS OF VIEW, SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY

I

Nietzsche is sometimes charged with megalomania. It must be admitted that he had, at least in sanguine moments, a high opinion of his place in the world of thought, and we should undoubtedly find it more becoming if he had left the expression of such an opinion—supposing there was ground for it—to others. The language is most offensive